As I've said before, Idol is not about finding the best singer or recording artist in America. It's about putting on a good TV show -- which means casting. A few weeks ago, Simon even mentioned the word "casting" on air. The fact that a few Idol graduates have become successful either as recording artists or in other parts of the entertainment industry is just gravy; it's not what the show is about (except for the fact that those few successes help feed the ratings, too).
As I said in another group, I like my Idol contestants to be diamonds-in-the-rough. Adam Lambert doesn't fit that requirement, because he was already too polished from the moment of his first audition for the show. BTW, there's lots of YouTube video of Adam performing in a variety of venues. Given that Adam is openly gay and many out-there pictures of him have surfaced, it'll be interesting to see how successful he will be. It'll be a good test of the American public's growing acceptance of gays. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of PGage Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 4:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [TV orNotTV] Re: Ooopsies. Dial carefully, America! On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 5:42 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: They are not looking for the best vocalist, or the most > soulful or artistic singing artist, they are looking for someone who > will sell lots of records. (SNIP) As long as I remember that, then > the show is actually pretty interesting. For instance, the judges all > went crazy over that guy yesterday (dark hair, kind of tortured, they > said he was from San Diego and had been trying to get into the music > biz on his own for a few years). I had him rated in the middle of the > pack of the evening's performances. The first year I watched the show > I would have been irritated with the judge's reaction and been trying > to get out of my obligation to keep watching it. Now I just shrug and > say "I guess the judges know what sells better than I do - that's > interesting". I am about 2/3 through the third season of AI have seen. Two or three times during that period I have heard a singer do a song that I thought "maybe I wouldn't cross the room to turn off the radio if that came on" - and that is about the best I could say about even the best performances on the show. I kind of like that young girl Allison Iraheta, but then someone told me she was like Kelly Clarkson, which scared me off of her (but I did like her tonight). But that version of "Tears of a Clown" by Adam Lambert (the guy I am alluding to above a few weeks ago) just blew me away. It was not just the best performance of tonight's show, or the season, it was head and shoulders the best performance of any song I have ever heard on this show. And this is what I was thinking earlier - the judges do have some sense of what makes a commercial singer, and they saw something in this guy early on even when I did not particularly (I never hated him, but he did not grab me really before tonight). But they have a sense of what they are looking for, and I have come to have a certain respect for that. I still don't understand what they see in singers like that Gokey guy, or the blind guy, or "Sarver". They said that for tonight they put on itunes the AI singers singing against the original Motown tracks - if they just put up that track from Lambert I would buy it (and now I see he has something of a Sylar vibe going on). One more thing - tonight's show illustrated just how great those Motown songs are. Those are the songs I grew up with, so I am biased, but if they sang nothing but Motown every week I would actually look forward to watching this show. Those songs stand up to the best of the those in the Great American Songbook, which you can see because they lent themselves to a variety of interpretations. This night made sense to me in a way that Michael Jackson night did not (and I thought the best songs for this show from that night were from the Jackson 5 period). --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TV or Not TV .... Smart (TV) People on Ice! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
